I’m not embarrassed to admit that I actually started writing this post quite some time ago. More than a year ago. According to the computerweb, I actually started it on January 19th, 2021. And now it’s May 11th, 2022. I wonder if I’ll finish it today. Or ever.
I’m a bread guy now. But you already knew that. My sister sent me a pretty cool book about sourdough (betcha didn’t know that! Oh, wait, most of you do… because you live with me). It’s called New World Sourdough, by Bryan Ford.. If I was a “pro” or even a “middling” blogger, this would be a great opportunity for an affiliate link. And when my four readers don’t buy the book, I’d make zero dollars. But it’s still a cool book, even if you don’t buy it. It has some interesting bread recipes, and also, his techniques are geared more towards regular people like me, who aren’t very good at making bread. This is a rather significant departure from a lot of the stuff I find on the ‘webs, which is clearly meant for not-me (I know this because I try them and, well…. there are problems).
Also, it has these sugar-covered snail-shaped rolls in it. When I was a kid and we went to Europe, our first stop was Spain, and we spent ten days or so on the lovely island of Mallorca. My brother, sister, and I would walk to a nearby bakery and, since we didn’t speak any Spanish, we’d point at these snail rolls and hold up our fingers to tell them how many we wanted. They were delicious. Anyway, these rolls are in the book. And guess what? They’re called “Mallorcas.” Like the island. In Spain.
Ok, this is getting pretty exciting. Deep breath….
So this past weekend I decided to try my hand at a bread called Pan Gallego. It has a knot on top! Anyway, it was going great - my dough was good, my knot was pretty good. I preheated a dutch oven to 400 degrees, put on my oven mitts, took it out of the oven, took off my over mitts, very carefully put the dough in the hot dutch oven without touching it.
Well so far this certainly doesn’t seem interesting enough to warrant a blog post. As if that’s ever stopped me before…
Ok, so where was I? Oh yeah. I picked up the 400 degree dutch oven with both hands, and…
…now I have bandages on six of my best fingers (assuming you count thumbs as fingers, which I do, I guess, based on this sentence alone).
And just to make matters worse, my guitar has been in the shop for three months and it just got back home. As you might imagine, the six aforementioned fingers are rather critical in the world of guitar-playing, so all I can do is gaze longingly at my long-lost short-found friend.
What really would have been nice is if, during the whole fingers-burning incident, someone was standing by and said, “Nate, don’t touch that 400 degree dutch oven with your bare hands!” But alas, no such person stood by and said no such thing.
But before you start assuming that my life is so unfortunate that I never have anyone standing by, warning me what not to touch - stop right there! You’d be wrong.
Another deep breath… this reminds me of a story…
This story begins many years ago, when I was a teenager in the suburbs of Rochester, NY. My mom was out of town. I had a few friends over. We did some stuff. I don’t remember most of it - largely because it was more than 30 years ago. But there are parts I do remember… yes, yes I do.
Towards the end of the evening, a couple of guys we knew showed up at my house. They showed up in a brand new SUV (was it really an SUV? I don’t know, it was more than 30 years ago). Turns out it wasn’t - strictly - their SUV. I suppose you could say it wasn’t really their SUV by any reasonable definition, other than the childhood-favorite possession-is-nine-tenths-of-the-law definition, which would seem to indicate that they were approximately nine-tenths owners of said SUV. These rather foolish fellas were, in fact, in possession of a vehicle they had just recently appropriated from a car dealer. Without, you know… paying for it. They then discovered a set of license plates just lying around, barely attached to another car by just a few easily removed screws. And then, for some reason I still don’t understand… “Let’s go to Nate’s mom’s house!”
I had three or four of my best friends with me at the house, and we all ran outside to see what was happening. We stood in the garage, looking out at this situation I couldn’t quite understand. We were rather well off middle class teenagers, with - at least in my mind - absolutely no use for a stolen car. But despite my apparent lack of adventurous spirit, there it was.
As some of us started tentatively creeping out of the garage and towards the “merchandise,” one of my friends hung back. It’s important to note that this particular friend was the son of the the chief deputy of the county sheriff’s department. He lived down the street from me, and as a teenager, he existed in a perpetual state of worry that his dad would find out about our shenanigans. Let’s keep in mind that, at least up until this very moment, creeping slowly out of my garage towards an SUV of questionable ownership, our shenanigans consisted mostly of going to high school parties and drinking beer or the occasional flask of Southern Comfort (ugh, even just writing those words brings back sickly-sweet memories and serious questions about why we would ever have chosen that particular brand of nastiness). It wasn’t uncommon that we’d be at a party, and this friend would try to mess with me by saying, “Nate, the cops are here!” - even though they weren’t. So, inevitably, I’d ask, “The cops are here?” At which point his eyes would go wide, as he realized that if the cops were here, it might somehow get back to his dad that not only were we at a party full of underage drinkers, but perhaps also that our drink of choice was none other than the smooth, satisfying concoction that, according to their official website, is “delicious in all the right ways.”
Of course, in almost all of these situations, what his young drunken brain failed to recognize was that the cops were, in fact, not there - but instead, this was yet another installment in a long string of let’s-pretend-the-cops-are-here pranks - backfiring, as usual. There were, however, a few times that the cops really did show up - in the suburbs of Rochester, I imagine there’s not a whole lot for them to do other than break up high school parties - but as you might imagine, there was a whole boy-who-cried-the-cops-are-here thing that made our conversations on this topic rather confusing, which wreaked a fair amount of havoc on our escape plans. And yet, even when the cops did show up, sit us down, and take our fake names so they could call our parents, word somehow never managed to make it back to his dad, and other than some mild scare tactics from Brighton’s finest, we were once again left to our own late-80s largely unsupervised devices.
So this friend - wary of a run-in with the cops that, in some small way, might be more significant than an illegally-consumed flask of SoCo on a Saturday night - treated the line between the garage and the driveway like The Wall in The North that keeps out The Wildlings and The White Walkers. And as the rest of us crept closer and closer to the thrill of something we’d never seen before, this friend started talking to me, at first quietly, but then with increasing volume as I continued to ignore him.
First, quietly: “Nate, don’t go out there!” I did.
Then, louder: “Nate, don’t go near that stolen car!” I did.
And finally, with clear desperation in his voice, as I peered in the window and my hands slowly raised from my sides: “Nate, don’t touch that stolen car!”
But alas, just as with the 400 degree dutch oven - I did just that.
Part of me wants to end right here. But there’s so much more to say, so - unless you have the courage to walk away in the middle of my story, or perhaps you’re one of the lucky few who sometimes reads this stuff for some reason, but just doesn’t care - you’re stuck with me for a while.
As I write this, I wonder for the first time why he was only trying to save me. What about the other guys who left the relative safety of the garage, unable to resist the lure of our newly-criminalized acquaintances and their grand-theft-auto prize? I suppose I’ll never know.
So here’s what happened (my version).
One of my friends decided he’d had enough fun at my house for the evening and got a ride home with the joy riders. Another friend followed them in his own car, so he could give them a ride home after they “stashed” the stolen goods overnight, in preparation for a next-day drive to to New York City, where they would sell the SUV for a tidy sum. Now, you might be wondering how a couple of kids from the suburbs of Rochester are going to find a buyer for a stolen vehicle on the streets of New York City - and I’ll admit, I was wondering the same thing - but by this point, the wise words of my paranoid friend had finally sunk in, and I was back in the relative safety of the garage, waving goodbye.
If you’ve been reading carefully, it should come as no surprise that this friend, the one who stayed behind, was getting more and more concerned that this whole situation was going to find its way back to his dad. In his mind, this is what would happen as the night progressed: The geniuses in the stolen car would get caught; somehow, the police would figure out that my friend and I were involved; some enterprising young officer would call the chief deputy of the sheriff’s department in the middle of the night, wake him up, and let him know that his son was, at best, fraternizing with the riff-raff, and at worst, the mastermind behind an international syndicate of hardened criminals; his dad would then get out of bed, get into his car, and drive down the street to make sure his son was, in fact, still at my house. I didn’t understand why ensuring he was still at my house was relevant, but I let him have his wildly far-fetched fantasy.
We expected our other friend to come back after all the ride-home stuff was done. And as the night wore on and he didn’t return, my friend got more and more paranoid. And I, having witnessed the paranoia at many-a high school party, knew that as always, we should just drink some Southern Comfort and get on with our evening. So, eventually, we went to sleep.
…sleep…
Early the next morning, the phone rang. I picked it up. It was my friend’s dad (well, that’s weird - he’s never called before). I handed the phone to my friend, he listened for a moment and said, just slowly enough as to sound completely unnatural, “No dad, I don’t know anything about a stolen car.”
So here’s what happened (the real version).
They dropped off the one friend at his house, and then they went to stash the car in the field outside of a retirement home. I don’t know why they picked a field outside a retirement home. Maybe they should have picked the parking lot of a bar, or some other place where it’s normal to leave a car overnight. The guys watching the security cameras, apparently, thought it was definitely NOT normal to drive a car at night into the field outside a retirement home. The cops showed up. There was a car chase in a field. There was a foot chase in a field. Three of my friends spent the night in jail. The police report very clearly states that they brought the car to “Nate’s mom’s house.” Somebody called the chief deputy of the sheriff’s department. The chief deputy got out of bed, got into his car, and drove down the street to make sure his son was, in fact, still at my house. Just… like... my friend… said it would happen.
So I guess that’s two times I probably should have listened to him, and also one time it would have been nice for him to be in my kitchen, looking out for me, as usual.